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This is my last digital will and testament …

On the second anniversary of my mother’s death, I got an email from her.

Technically, it wasn’t from her. But there was her name in my inbox, sent from an old Yahoo email address that had probably sat unused for at least five years. In the body of the message was a link to a gibberish URL that was obviously spam.

Some specialty services, let you manage your digital affairs before you die, storing your passwords and securing your files so that your family can access them when you’re not around to help. (dreamstime)

I instantly assumed this was the work of a hacker using inactive webmail accounts like a zombie spam army. But that didn’t make it any less jarring.

My mom died after a long illness. She had plenty of time to get her legal and financial affairs in order, and she did. But she was never particularly web-savvy — she didn’t have much of a social media presence, mostly preferring to use her work and Internet-provider email accounts. I’m not sure it would even have occurred to her to settle her digital affairs.

When someone in your family dies, there’s enough to deal with without worrying about closing his or her digital accounts — assuming you even know how to find them all. You probably know about their primary email and social media profiles, but what about accounts with e-commerce sites like Amazon or PayPal, entertainment services like Netflix or iTunes, or online storage sites like Dropbox?

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Some specialty services, such as SecureSafe, let you manage your digital affairs before you die, storing your passwords and securing your files so that your family can access them when you’re not around to help. Google has also started offering an Inactive Account Manager that monitors if you stop using your account (presumably because you are dead) and sends a notification to a trusted contact when you do. It can then give the contact access to your Gmail and related accounts, such as YouTube and Google Drive.

But Evan Carroll of The Digital Beyond sees one fundamental problem with most digital legacy management services: “As humans, we’re inherently a bit lazy,” he says. It’s a tough sell to ask someone to spend their time and money on a product whose benefits they won’t ever see.

He sees a market for online services that help people track their deceased relative’s online footprint after their death, when the need is more pressing. One new service called WebCease uses automated and manual searches to find all their digital assets, and sends a report listing them and providing instructions on how to settle accounts with each company. “From a business standpoint, $529 isn’t all that much to part with in exchange for saving about 40 hours worth of work on your own,” Carroll writes on The Digital Beyond blog.

Adele McAlear of Death and Digital Legacy recommends using one primary email account to set up all your social media and online profiles, and making sure someone you trust gets the password. “That is the magic key to open up all your online accounts.”

I had decided to ignore the spam from my mom’s zombie account until more messages followed every few weeks. Then I noticed that some of her friends were getting them, too. I didn’t want anyone else to get such an unsettling surprise, so I got in touch with Yahoo customer service through Twitter.

A helpful rep offered his condolences and took down my mother’s email address. He told me Yahoo was able to deactivate the account, so now no one else can sign in or use it. But to delete it completely, Yahoo would need a formal request and copies of legal documents.

For a webmail account that my mom used socially and long ago, that seemed like a lot of work, so my brother and I agreed to leave it deactivated instead of deleted. We might revisit that later, but for now we’re just glad to know that there won’t be any more undead emails.

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